Philippines bats for more professionals in Japan

MANILA, Philippines—The government aims to send more professional service providers to Japan, by asking the Japanese government to reduce barriers to entry.

Assistant Trade Secretary and Bureau of International Trade Relations director Ramon Vicente Kabigting said the country wanted to better utilize the commitments regarding movement of persons under the Philippines-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement.

“Our ambition is for our service providers to go there. For years, the only Filipino professionals in Japan were choreographers, dancers, singers, composers, and musicians,” he said.

He related that one of the biggest barriers to entry for Filipino professionals there was language. Filipino seafarers, for example, were not allowed to board Japanese vessels before because all signages were in Nihongo.

The language barrier had also prevented Filipino nurses from breaking into the Japanese healthcare sector. Out of the two batches of nurses, a total of 136 individuals, who left for Japan and took the Japanese nursing licensure exam over the past two years, only two passed, he said.

The exam is administered entirely in Nihongo.

Kabigting said this is one of the issues that the Philippine panel will discuss with its Japanese counterpart in December when they meet to review the treaty.

“We don’t want this to take as long as the seafarers anecdote did,” he said.

In an earlier interview, Labor Undersecretary Hans Leo Cacdac said the Japanese government has already agreed to make things easier for foreign nurses to pass the licensure exam by putting in some English words for some of the medical terms.

The third batch of 70 nurses who left for Japan earlier this year will take this particular exam, he said.

Also, he said, the Japanese government was willing to further extend the three months’ worth of language training that Filipino nurses were now getting here in the country prior to leaving for Japan.

The Japanese government-funded in-country language training, he said, could be extended by another few months, if deemed necessary.

“We’ll look at the results (of the exams of the third batch), which should be out by February or March next year. If the results are favorable, we’ll discuss this with (the Japanese government) again,’’ he said.

Apart from the three months of language training here, nurses wanting to practice in Japan also get another six months of more advanced language study when they get there.

After this training, they take an exam that determines their qualification to take the nursing licensure exam.

“What we want is for the Japanese government to allow the language training to facilitate the learning of the language, and not make it as a pre-requisite for qualification,’’ Cacdac said.